StudioLive comes to LIPA

Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), well equipped with several tracking and mixdown rooms, recently added a PreSonus StudioLive 24.4.2 digital console to its arsenal. This follows the news that Absolute Radio is using a PreSonus StudioLive 16.0.2 digital console for its mobile setup.

"We've got a fair amount of studio equipment, and a fair amount of live sound equipment,” said Jon Thornton, Director of LIPA's School of Sound Technology. "But the StudioLive filled a perfect niche for us. First, it gave us something with a small footprint, which was great for lectures and events where a large desk is overkill. But more importantly, it blows away the boundary between a live desk and a recording console. The way you can quickly and easily plug in a laptop and capture multitrack audio for all kinds of gigs is great for us.

"We've got six studios with consoles ranging from SSLs to Icons. But if a musician or an engineer says 'we don't want to sit in a studio, we want to track in, say, this vibe-y church we found somewhere,' it's really, really easy to just take the StudioLive and a small laptop rig to do tracking almost anywhere.

"We do a lot of one-off shows: intimate cantina gigs for around 100 people. The StudioLive is perfect for those, and we're now able to record every gig. And we'll be taking it along for a ten-day music festival we've got coming up as well.

"The user interface on the StudioLive is great. It's a very intuitive, visual and tactile approach, with hands-on faders and a simple workflow that's easy for students to grasp. And the Capture application is clean and simple and doesn't get in the way of the spontaneity of the live mixing process.

"The StudioLive may not be the solution for everything we do, but it's a great solution for a lot of things we weren't able to do easily before."